Emma Bates is Founder and CEO of Cachai (“ka-chai”), a defense software startup focused on secure, scalable, and coherent collaborative autonomy. Cachai offers the first distributed software infrastructure platform as an integratable layer for unmanned and disconnected systems.
Before founding Cachai with her brother Jesse in 2023, Emma worked for the government as a Technology & National Security Fellow for the Defense Innovation Unit and Army Futures Command; a Research Associate for the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Project on History and Strategy and its Defense Industrial Initiatives Group; and a Defense Advisor for Data Vortex Technologies.
Her broad CV has given her a view of the operational demand for resilient autonomy, the technical elements required to build it, and the institutional barriers to purchasing and fielding it. She is a Subject Matter Expert and frequent speaker on the topic of swarming, and her writing on swarming and distributed autonomy has appeared in War on the Rocks.
Based in the Washington, D.C. area